Diplomats say de-escalation talks continue as Trump vows retaliation over US soldier deaths

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The US military said it has launched its 10th consecutive round of strikes on Iran to force the reopening of the strait of Hormuz.

Earlier on Monday, Iran’s president said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies, even as diplomats said talks to de-escalate were continuing.

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© Photograph: US Central Command (CENTCOM)/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: US Central Command (CENTCOM)/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: US Central Command (CENTCOM)/AFP/Getty Images

Heatwaves, high energy prices, calls for reindustrialisation and North Sea drilling are all high on the to-do list

Wildfires cast a pall of smoke this week over Greater Manchester, whose former mayor Andy Burnham stands on the threshold of No 10. Amid three UK heatwaves so far this year, which have killed thousands of people in England and Wales, damaged harvests and left children crying in classrooms, the new prime minister’s plans for the climate crisis remain as shrouded as his city.

“Burnham has been very quiet about the climate [crisis] so far,” says Chris Venables, an environmental campaigner and fellow at the Green Alliance thinktank. “I don’t think [it] is at the forefront of his mind, but that does not mean he will water down this agenda.”

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© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock

This isn’t the first time power outages have caused issues for Waymo.

Chinese company Moonshot AI released a new version of its Kimi model this week, prompting concern about "full AI communism."

The Department of Justice says that federal employees can now download TikTok on their government devices.

A newly renewed, $25 million-per-year contract with a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters further expands the power of ICE under the Trump administration.

A newly renewed, $25 million-per-year contract with a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters further expands the power of ICE under the Trump administration.

This week, San Francisco’s attorney general, David Chiu, sent cease-and-desist letters, demanding that Apple and Google remove 13 so-called nudification apps from their app stores, Wired reported.

Nudification apps can make it trivially easy to transform ordinary photos of real people into explicit images. The harmful AI tools allow bad actors to remove clothing, change a person’s features, place them in sexualized positions, and swap victims’ faces onto other people’s naked bodies.

Chiu's letter warned that app stores were violating "California’s laws that prohibit supporting services that create deepfake pornography," Wired reported.

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The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

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T-Mobile canceled some longtime subscribers' free-line promotions as part of a forced migration to new rate plans, spurring complaints from customers yesterday. T-Mobile admitted the problem and blamed it on technical errors that it is trying to fix.

The forced plan changes were controversial to begin with, particularly as many longtime users are being hit with price hikes of $6 per line. The unexpected loss of free lines for some of those users could raise prices by a much higher amount if the change isn't reversed.

There is good news, though. T-Mobile told Ars today that it was a mistake and that the company is working to fix the problem. Of course, it's not always easy for telecom customers to get the proper resolution even after a company admits to an error publicly. But given T-Mobile's statement today, we hope the firm will fix the problem for all impacted customers with as little hassle as possible.

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Facing mounting pressure to acknowledge that Grok can still be used to generate non-consensual sexualized images of adults and minors, xAI filed a lawsuit Tuesday, suing the first user that Elon Musk’s firm has accused of using its chatbot to create illegal content.

The complaint targets Terry Wayne Harwood, who was arrested earlier this year for possession and distribution of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), the South Carolina attorney’s office announced.

As xAI alleged, the company assisted in that arrest after discovering that Harwood had been using two xAI accounts for months to undress or “nudify” non-sexual images of multiple victims, including a young girl who appeared to be as young as 10.

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Google must give rival AI assistants and search engines greater access to key parts of Android and Google Search after the European Union ordered the company to comply with the bloc's digital antitrust rules.

The two decisions, handed down Thursday, could weaken Google's control over two of the tech industry's most important platforms and have far-reaching consequences for the company, shape the future of its AI tool Gemini, and open up new opportunities for rivals to gain ground. Google has until January 2027 to begin sharing search data and July 2027 to implement changes to Android.

The rulings stem from technical regulatory proceedings …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

In an opinion published Tuesday, US District Judge James Boasberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the State Department from enforcing the policy until the CITR’s lawsuit is resolved.

On its face, the policy does not require visa denials or deportations. Instead, it authorizes immigration investigations into individuals suspected of helping foreign adversaries attempt to manipulate public opinion by suppressing US speech.

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The Federal Communications Commission will vote to repeal the National Television Ownership Rule that is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The proposed change sets up a likely court battle over the FCC claim that it has authority to repeal a limit set by Congress.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has already treated the rule as more of a suggestion. In March, the Carr FCC granted a waiver allowing Nexstar Media Group to buy Tegna in a deal that let it reach over half of TV households. The Carr FCC argued that Congress gave it authority to modify or waive the rule.

Carr now plans to repeal the 39 percent limit and replace it with a "case-by-case review" of each proposed merger, the chairman announced today in an op-ed published on Breitbart. The change would make it easier for the FCC to pick and choose which station groups get to surpass the limit. Under Carr, this would likely benefit news companies that provide favorable coverage for President Trump.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved the launch of Reflect Orbital's Earendil 1 satellite — a space mirror 18 meters wide designed to reflect sunlight to the ground.

The post Observers Beware: Reflect Orbital’s Space Mirrors Approved for Launch appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Meta's AI-fueled layoffs of 8,000 employees targeted workers with disabilities and those who took protected medical or family leaves, alleged a lawsuit filed by 26 employees who were selected for termination. Meta used internal AI tools to select employees for layoffs, according to the complaint filed yesterday by 26 "Doe" plaintiffs in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

"Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work. Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems—including a system referred to internally as 'Metamate,' employee-trained 'second-brain' agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration—to score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the list," the lawsuit said.

Employees were allegedly graded, among other things, on how much they used Meta's AI tools. "Meta’s internal dashboards classified employees by their stage of adoption of its artificial-intelligence tools, using categories such as 'AI Native,' 'AI First,' and 'AI Enabled,'" the lawsuit said.

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Government to launch campaign to help people cope with events such as weather emergencies or cyber-attacks

The British public should begin taking “small but important steps” to secure and protect water, power supplies and basic phone signal in case of further severe weather emergencies, national crises or cyber-attacks, Downing Street has said.

Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, told MPs “the risks we face from climate change cannot be underestimated”, and warned of the “significant and prolonged disruption to essential services” extreme weather events could cause.

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© Photograph: Hugh Hastings/Getty Images

© Photograph: Hugh Hastings/Getty Images

© Photograph: Hugh Hastings/Getty Images

Lobby appeals to prospective PM’s reindustrialisation agenda as it pushes for Rosebank and Jackdaw approval

The UK’s North Sea oil industry has made a last-ditch attempt to curry favour with the Labour government by appealing to Andy Burnham’s reindustrialisation agenda just days before he is expected to become Britain’s next prime minister.

Industry lobbyists have written to more than 400 Labour MPs to call on the government’s new leaders to allow more oil and gas drilling in UK waters to support homegrown energy and show “a commitment to UK manufacturing, industrial capability and the skilled workforce that has powered the nation for generations”.

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© Photograph: Rick Wood Photography/Alamy

© Photograph: Rick Wood Photography/Alamy

© Photograph: Rick Wood Photography/Alamy

The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep, and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.

Public lands grazing is overseen by a nearly century-old system that heavily subsidizes some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address its harms to the environment, ProPublica and High Country News found last year.

Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management—the first overhaul since 1995—would instead expand the practice.

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Last week, thousands of SamKnows routers were bricked after a government program ran its course.

In 2020, as part of a program conducted by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian government's chief competition regulator, thousands of volunteers received routers to help test and report on the typical speed and performance of broadband plans in Australia. (More specifically, the Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program targeted fixed-line broadband services provided over the NBN, Australia's government-owned wholesale open-access broadband network, as well as services delivered over other access networks.)

According to the final report that the ACCC distributed, the routers are whiteboxes that were “supplied by SamKnows” and that “perform tests to measure internet performance using test servers maintained by SamKnows and hosted in Australia.”

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